For this year’s digital fair, Ricco/Maresca presents a one-person booth of the work of Gil Batle.
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Batle was born in San Francisco in 1962 to Filipino parents. He spent over 20 years in and out of five different California prisons for convictions of fraud and forgery. His self-taught drawing ability evolved behind bars into sophisticated tattooing skills that protected him from murderous gang violence in prisons such as San Quentin, Chuckawalla, and Jamestown. Where Bloods, Crips, and Aryan Brotherhood gang-bangers in racially segregated cell-blocks rule with intimidation and threat, Batle’s facility for drawing was considered magic by the murderers, drug dealers, and armed robbers whose stories he now recounts in minutely carved detail on fragile ostrich egg-shell sculptures and works on paper.
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Batle was born in San Francisco in 1962 to Filipino parents. He spent over 20 years in and out of five different California prisons for convictions of fraud and forgery. His self-taught drawing ability evolved behind bars into sophisticated tattooing skills that protected him from murderous gang violence in prisons such as San Quentin, Chuckawalla, and Jamestown. Where Bloods, Crips, and Aryan Brotherhood gang-bangers in racially segregated cell-blocks rule with intimidation and threat, Batle’s facility for drawing was considered magic by the murderers, drug dealers, and armed robbers whose stories he now recounts in minutely carved detail on fragile ostrich egg-shell sculptures and works on paper.
